(Thanks to Jackson for the link.)

PervScan has been online since May 2003, and in the past four years one of the most sensational cases has surely been that of Armin Meiwes. PervScan has discussed it twice: Let’s Eat My Penis, Then Kill Me and The Cannibal Video. From the comments, you wouldn’t know that the cannibal video was one that “nobody wanted to watch.” To the contrary, everybody wanted to watch it. Some commenters asked where to download it on the net. There was even a report that bootleg copies of it were being sold, but nobody claims to have actually purchased a copy. It must have been a rumor or a scam.

If you were one of those filled with a lust for disgust — “I have no taste but distaste,” as a Dada manifesto once declared — you still won’t be able to see the video. But thanks to Manfred Risse’s new book, Abendmahl der Mörder (Last Supper of the Murderer), you can at least read what somebody else remembers seeing. That must be one hell of a video if a whole book can be written about the experience of watching it. Hannibal Lecter, eat your heart out.

That people should want to see the video is not so surprising. It’s not a simple matter you can dismiss by saying, “Oh, people are sick.” There may well be a good deal of health in the universal impulse that causes people to rubberneck at accidents and cheer at public executions. Perhaps it works like an inoculation, a little injection of sickness that fosters a superior health. It would be an interesting subject for a scientific study. Show one group of viewers a comedy, say, a Marx Brothers film. Show another group the cannibal video. (Which also has its comedic aspects. A guy declaring “we can eat my balls for breakfast” may have a death wish, but at least he hasn’t lost his sense of humor.) Which group do you think would be better for the experience?

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

How often have you heard a parent or grandparent pick up a child and say, “Oooh, you’re so cute I could eat you up” or something to that effect? Maybe they even nibble the neck of the cute little one or pretend to take a bite. Evidently that’s the healthy side of an urge that Mr. Walker possessed in its pathological state. He really did want to “eat up” little children. Probably he would have appreciated a bon mot of W.C. Fields. “I love little children,” Fields quipped, “but only when they’re properly cooked.”

What makes Mr. Walker’s case particularly fascinating is the fact that, aside from possessing child pornography, he hasn’t committed any other crime (or at least he hasn’t been accused of any). He wrote down his fantasies about children and cannibalism but, so far as is known, he kept them to himself. It’s only when his ex-wife — whose own motives you’d have to question — discovered his fantasies that authorities were alerted to Mr. Walker’s rather extreme proclivity.

But since when are fantasies criminal? On one hand, a man should be free to write down his weirdest or even his most awful fantasies. Perhaps he wasn’t lying when he said that writing these things down exorcised the urge to actually do them. On the other hand, though, when are fantasies just that — fantasies — and when are they warning signs of a dangerous outbreak of pathological behavior? After all, the guy had lists with names of actual kids. Why wait until somebody gets hurt or killed in order to reign this guy in? It’s a tough call. How do you balance between the civil rights of a person and the potential horrors that he could commit?

In a way, it’s fortunate that authorities have a crime with which they can charge Mr. Walker. They can stick it to him on the kiddie porn charge and thereby oblige him to get some psychiatric help. Imagine what a dilemma this would be if the guy had no child pornography in his possession. Could you convict someone just for writing down — without even disseminating — some fantasies?

(Thanks to alanr, joey, and olava1 for the link.)

For most people, a good breakfast consists of coffee, tea, orange juice, toast, eggs, cereal, a bagel, maybe a croissant. Some people eat last night’s leftovers for breakfast — cold pizza, or even Chinese food. Others like a hardy meal. But it’s those few who like a hearty meal who obviously have a problem. What can you say about a guy who’s “grilling rotting human flesh for his breakfast, including part of a heart?” Maybe he was grilling it for the obvious reason that, if you’re going to eat putrescent man-meat, you don’t want to eat it raw. Or maybe he ran out of Wheaties and didn’t feel like going to the store. Or maybe he was just fucking insane.

When sending the link, reader Joey quipped that the article doesn’t mention whether the cannibal used cilantro. Evidently the cannibal cooked the guy in tomato and onion sauce, which makes you wonder if some spices go better with human flesh than others. Are there better and worse ways to cook human flesh? The guy who ate his own penis fried it. The notorious German cannibal sautéd his victim’s penis with garlic, salt and pepper. The cannibal who cooked his victim in a campfire said it tasted like chicken. Probably there is an art to cooking human flesh — an old joke about a cannibal cookbook says it would be subtitled “How to Better Serve Your Fellow Man” — but of course this is an art that does not yet seem to have been systematically explored. There are in fact two books titled something like “Cannibal Cookbook” — one’s an anthropology book, the other is a compendium of jokes. So if you’re a cannibal Julia Child, your market still awaits you.

P.S. According to another article sent by alanr, the loco Mexican cannibal claimed that his lover had a lamb-like flavor: “The meat tasted like lamb, and if they’d let me, I would have eaten it all,” he told police. “I ate about 2.5 kilograms [5.5 pounds],” Arias said. “It tasted very good.”

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

Anyone with the least amount of perspicacity saw this one coming. Earlier this year German cannibal Armin Miewes avoided a life sentence by claiming that his victim wanted to be killed and eaten. Miewes had compelling evidence to back up this claim — a videotape in which he and the victim chop off the latter’s penis, cook it, and try to eat it. Yes, that’s right, both of them tried to eat it — the victim too.

Now who can doubt that every ne’er-do-well cannibal that comes along is going to try the same defense? “I don’t eat people, I just fulfill their desire to be eaten.” At least Miewes had incredible evidence establishing the validity of his defense. This cannibal — a chef who chewed up the left breast of his pregnant girlfriend — doesn’t seem to have any evidence at all. “She wanted it,” he says. Yeah, right. What she wanted was to nourish her baby with her breast milk, not to feed her creepy boyfriend with her breast.

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

When you read a story like this, you can’t help but wonder: “Hm, does it really taste like chicken?” You look down at your penis, if you happen to have one, or if you don’t then you imagine a penis you’ve seen, and there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly poultry-like about it. It certainly doesn’t have wings or a beak. It doesn’t lay eggs or feed on corn. Why would it taste like chicken? Human muscle looks pretty raw when the skin is torn off it, so you imagine it would taste more like some kind of red meat.

Still, you don’t have much choice but to believe a guy who’s been there and done that. If a cannibal says the human penis tastes like chicken, it must taste like chicken… But then you wonder how chickens would feel to know that they taste like dick. It must be pretty insulting. You can imagine chickens trading barbs in the barnyard. “Cluck cluck cluck” is what you hear, but really they’re saying, “Motherfucker, you stink like that old farmer’s nut sack. Shit…”

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

You may have noticed a month or so ago that the notorious German cannibal ended up receiving a very mild prison sentence, primarily since he had videotape showing his victim begging to be eaten. It changed his crime from homicide to something like euthanasia, which carries a much lesser penalty.

When you read about this or about other convicted cannibals, you can’t help but wonder: What do these reformed cannibals do when they’re released back into society? Are they really reformed? If not — and how can you ever be sure? — then isn’t it like putting a fox in the hen house to put a cannibal back in the company of men?

This Swedish cannibal is now an outpatient at a clinic. He has to report once a week, but otherwise he’s pursuing a normal life. He has adopted a “tidy appearance” and begun the study of foreign languages “on a higher academic level.” However, emotionally he is still marked by a lack of empathy and an inability “to comprehend how other people think” (meaning he finds it difficult to understand why people don’t want to throw themselves onto his molars). Presumably the cannibal’s doctors must have wanted him to study languages as a way of helping him empathize with his fellow man.

It all sounds so — well — Scandinavian: higher education as an antidote to animal impulses, linguistics as the cure to severe psychopathology, the study of tongues as a replacement for the eating of them. Wouldn’t a good old-fashioned American type punishment be better? Gather up all the world’s “reformed” cannibals, fly them to an isolated tropical island, give each one a straw hat, a Bowie knife, and a portable camera — a CannibalCam™ — and turn ‘em loose. May the fittest cannibal win, may the others get what they deserve — poetic justice — and may the home viewer get the latest extreme in reality tv. Or perhaps at that juncture it becomes surreality tv…

(Thanks to alanr for the link.)

After the sensational German cannibal trial, it’s hard to get very excited about the various other cannibals out there — and, shockingly enough, they’re out there. In comparison to the German cannibal, all these other cannibals just seem so two-bit, so second-rate, so cheap. This British cannibal was actually caught cooking up his victim’s brain on the stove — and yet somehow it just doesn’t give you that awful frisson the German cannibal gave you. Perhaps the reason is because it wasn’t the cannibalism itself but rather the victim’s collusion that made the German episode so shocking. It’s easier to understand the desire to eat someone than it is to understand the desire to be eaten, especially when the victim eats himself — eats his own penis — as in the German case.

Anyway, this certainly is no consolation to the parents of this British maneater. It must really be an awful thing to learn that your kid is such a sicko. This particular guy had already caused his parents enough heartache with a previous murder conviction, drug abuse, insanity — now he has to go and eat somebody’s brain. It’s not what you call being a good son.

If you follow the link to read the story, have a long look at the picture of the cannibal as a young boy. It’s always weird to see pictures of murderers and freaks when they were little children. Naturally you tend to think of children as innocent, and yet with the benefit of hindsight you know that this particular child became a cannibalistic creep, and so you experience a fundamental contradiction looking at the picture. You can’t reconcile your notion of innate innocence with your knowledge of actual guilt. Somehow you even want to laugh at the picture — mentally you superimpose the crime over the little face and it seems too big for him, too adult, and therefore you laugh in the same way you would if you saw him dressed in his father’s clothes.

One of the weird things about a notorious crime is not just the psychopathology of the perpetrator but the deviant adulation it can bring out of the most seemingly “normal” people. Charles Manson is not the only arch criminal who receives fan mail by the bagful. Every murder seems to have not only its killer and its victim but its groupie too.

So as you sit there and wonder about these homicidal freaks eating the flesh of their rape victims, you also have to wonder about the people who feel a need to reach out to them, contact them, correspond with them, sometimes meet or even marry them. What propels them to do it? What makes a nice little Japanese girl so obsessed with a cannibalistic pedophile that she carries around a little doll made up in his likeness? (She affectionately called it “little Tsutomu.”)

Obviously the psychology must differ from person to person. For one, getting to know a murderer is probably an expression of rebellion. For another, it appeals to some weird nurturing instinct — rather than sympathize with the victim, the person sympathizes with the criminal. The horror of the crime gets lost in the plight of the perpetrator. The more the media vilifies him, the more the groupie feels the need to nurture and protect the criminal. It’s a vicious cycle until the next murderer comes along. Then the press loses interest, and guess what? So does the groupie. The “Little Angel,” the article explains, ultimately gave up on the crazed cannibal.

“My feelings couldn’t get through to that man,” she says. “I’ve lost interest in him.”

In case you felt like you hadn’t had enough of the German cannibal case lately, you’ll be happy to know that the trial is back in session after adjourning for the holidays. As the trial resumes, no doubt there will be a steady stream of new articles about Armin Miewes and his victim, Bernd-Juergen Brandes. And this one, which profiles the past of Miewes and, to a lesser extent, Brandes, is one of the best to appear on the case yet. If you were wondering just how someone gets to be such a freak, this story might actually offer a little insight into the process.

Weirdly, Miewes’s life sounds as though it were modeled after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho — complete with decaying family mansion, domineering mother, repressed homosexual tendencies. In fact, Miewes’s mother sounds even more domineering than the mother of the fictional Norman Bates. When other boys were wearing jeans to school, she made him wear lederhosen. As he grew up, he continued to live with her. He joined the army but lived at home. On a rare trip away, his mother went with him and shared a double room. On a date, she sat in the backseat of his car. When someone asked him why he didn’t marry, he said he wouldn’t until his mother died. Meanwhile, he was evolving his cannibal fantasies. He kept a dismembered Barbie doll locked in a safe so his mother wouldn’t find it.

However, if the story of Miewes is modern Gothic, that of Brandes remains inscrutable. Unlike Miewes, his mother died young. Like Miewes, he seems to have been sexually ambivalent. But that’s about all anybody seems to know, at least so far. In a previous entry, PervScan suggested that Brandes may really be the interesting one in this story, and so far it’s true: the cannibal was sick, but the victim who offered himself up — and willingly ate his own penis — seems beyond human comprehension, like a God only psychopathic.

In case you’ve been feeling a void in your life since the trial of the German cannibal has quieted down, here’s another repugnant tale of flesh-eating. In fact, in spite of the grisly details of the German story, this tale may even be more repugnant — in the German story, at least the victim agreed to be eaten. Here you have an apparent sicko attacking a helpless little baby.

What was this guy thinking, anyway? “I’ll just help myself to a little Baby Gerkin here… Mum will never notice.” Usually when a mother returns home to find an unhappy baby, the diaper is one of the first things she checks. It goes without saying that she would notice if her baby’s penis had been chomped off. It’s just not the kind of thing a parent would overlook.

So did the guy want to go to jail? Did he find the notion of eating a baby’s penis just so irresistible that he didn’t care? Did he think it was worth it? Apparently some people try to live out their fantasies without realizing that they have consequences in reality.